Sean Scully: Tapestry
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
Sean Scully, who is among the most acclaimed Irish painters working today, turned 80 in June. Since his early years at Croydon College of Art, on the southern edge of London, the artist has produced a vast catalogue of abstract art: in 2025 alone he has held exhibitions of new work in Hamburg, New York, Barcelona and Daegu, in South Korea.
This exhibition at the Kerlin is one of the most rewarding encounters I’ve had with his work in recent years. Scully shows no sign of retreating into habit. Instead he looks at medium and pictorial idiom afresh, recasting them as open problems: the artist embeds motifs into his work only to disassemble and rephrase them.
Scully has reflected in recent interviews on Irish identity and the national tendency to play with language. Speaking and writing with imaginative elasticity, he suggests, are ways to create new ideas: even a regurgitated or repeated phrase can surprise you with the spontaneity of a novel twist. Something of that iterative playfulness is at the heart of Tapestry.
The exhibition features fabric artworks that are genuinely new in the context of Scully’s previous exhibited work. Two large pieces – the Translation of Drawing duo – are handwoven surfaces that incorporate Scully’s signature array of rectilinear shapes; the heavy, coarse material is suspended between two horizontal poles.
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The solidity of these embroidered works (which also impress with their physical weight) is further amplified by their monochrome palette. Scully displays the work with their originating pencil sketches, which are by contrast light and agile, and rendered with quick, bold marks.
The translation from drawing into textile is significant: from almost immaterial beginnings Scully produces two substantial fabric objects. Using natural handspun materials, Scully conjures a sense of permanence. These associations, especially in light of the artist’s age, situate the works within the well-established language of late-stage art.
From here we move to Scully’s Stack series, large-scale works on aluminium that dominate the room. These paintings combine his familiar brushwork with spray-painted surfaces. I was not previously aware of Scully’s use of spray paint; the gallerist Elly Collins notes that he has been experimenting with the medium for some time.
The sprayed areas introduce strange visual disjunctions, as though different panels were coming into focus at different speeds. These works appear as dark, troubling monoliths, punctuated by flashes of violent red and malevolent pink.
Scully’s well-known stripe motif is applied throughout, evoking at once the imagery of prison bars and the charged spectacle of flag-waving patriotism.
[ Sean Scully: 'I am an Irishman and I love a good fight'Opens in new window ]
The final sequence brightens the exhibition considerably. A series of oils on copper, these works intervene gleefully within the space. Thick impasto blocks of red, yellow, blue and orange are set against the metal surface, which because it does not absorb the paint lends the compositions a buoyant, fleeting quality.
It’s as though the colour blocks are moving swiftly across the canvas, jostling and colliding for position.
This excellent exhibition recalls Arthur Danto’s judgment that Scully belongs “on the shortest of short lists of the major painters of our time”.
Tapestry is at the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until Saturday, January 24th, 2026
